Is Desegration Just a Myth?

First of all, I just want to thank everyone who responded to my first post.  It’s nice to be read by other people…er, even if they are required to do so for the class.  Anyway, I also just wanted to make it clear that vouchers are not going to be my class-long topic.  I’m doing education in the inner-city—vouchers just seemed like an issue that was pertinent.  And I may well come back to it, but not today.

 The inspiration for this post comes from a personal experience from just today.  I’ve been volunteering with a group of special-needs young adults (20-26) in Grand Rapids with a program called Kent Vocational Options so I can get my neccesary tutoring hours before applying to the College of Education (and yes, apparen’t these students do count as secondary—I’ve asked).  Anyway, the focus of the program is to help the students be self-sufficient and responsible as they can, and part of that involves working at the cafeteria at Madison Middle School, which is just across the street and also in Grand Rapids.  Today was the first time I’d accompanied the students to their job, and the first time I’d been to Madison.  This is where the issue of segregation comes in.

I would say about 90% to 95% of the students at Madison are black from what I saw at lunch time (on a side note, I’m not trying to offend by using “black” instead of “African-American”—sometimes, though, I feel like “African-American” is a term white people, myself included, hide their insecurities behind when their confronted with issues of race that they’d like to pretend didn’t exist).  There were a handfull of white and Latino students, and the one’s there seemed to be accepted—but still, almost all of the students were black.

 There are probably a lot of reasons for this.  Maybe its just that Madison is in a mostly black neighborhood (I’m not sure that it is, but I could be wrong).  But it brings up the question—is desegration just a myth we’re told to give us warm fuzzy feelings about how much more tolerant and multicultural we are now?  Of course, legally, desegregation is a fact—there are no more schools official for white or black students only.  But is de facto segregation as much of a fact.

But one might say, Kevin, what’s wrong with schools being segregated if it’s self-imposed segregation?  Well, this article from the Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram offers a good explanation:

It’s not so much that brown and black students need to sit next to Anglo students in class — it’s that the Anglo children bring money and competition. If the Supreme Court found in 1954 that “separate but equal” schooling was not an acceptable practice, it’s still not acceptable to think that poor, minority children will learn successfully without middle- and upper-income classmates.

Senior research associate Richard Fry of the Pew Hispanic Center wrote in his study “The Changing Landscape of American Public Education; New Students, New Schools” that there’s been a rapid increase in student enrollment accompanied by the building of new schools. Between the 1993-94 and 2002-03 school years, Latino enrollment accounted for 64 percent, blacks 23 percent and Asians 11 percent of the national growth. Anglo enrollment fell by 1 percent.

School districts quickly built 15,368 schools during that time to reach an enrollment of 6.1 million students in the 2002-03 school year. Fry’s study found that 2.5 million Anglo students filled the new schools as their enrollment in older schools dropped by 2.6 million students. Two-thirds of the Latino students’ increase was accommodated in the older schools.

Fry discovered that despite population changes, “a substantial majority of white students attended schools populated primarily by other whites, and relatively few attended schools populated primarily by minorities.”

Orfield and Lee examined the country’s 24 largest central-city school districts for 2002-03 along three variables: graduation rate (the percent of students who graduated), poverty level (percent of students on free or reduced-price lunch); and majority-minority student enrollment (percent of students in majority-minority schools).

How do those criteria fare locally? Arlington school district students had a 60 percent graduation rate, with 41 percent of students on free or reduced lunch. Forty-three percent Anglo, 87 percent Latino and 81 percent black students attended majority-minority schools.

Fort Worth school district students has a 50 percent graduation rate, with 64 percent on free or reduced lunch. Sixty-three percent Anglo, 96 percent Latino and 93 percent black students attended majority-minority schools.

The article also gives some views on how this re-segregation started and is being propitiated:

Bennet, the Denver superintendent, faced angry faculty, students and community activists for the Manual school closing. Instead, the entire community should be outraged at segregated housing patterns, white-flight transfer policies, minimum-wage jobs, school district gerrymandering that leaves minorities isolated, and private-school escapes that leave minority kids behind.

The idea that most intrigues me, as well as most disturbs me, is the notion of gerrymandering—drawing school zones specifically for the purpose of keeping white students out of black schools.  In many ways, if the charge of gerrymandering is true, it would blow the lid off the idea that this kind of segregation is self-imposed—it would amount, essentially, to a conspiracy.  I’m not quite ready to say that this is what is going on at Madison, but…I would like to see a map of the school district all of the sudden.